PRESS RELEASE ::: SIDONIE VILLERE --- 'Preserve'

JONATHAN FERRARA GALLERY is proud to announce Preserve, new mixed media paintings and sculpture by artist SIDONIE VILLERE. The exhibition will be on view from 2 June through 31 July 2014 with an opening reception on Saturday, 7 June from 6-9pm.

Preserve unveils Villere’s most recent suite of evocative and ethereal art works. These abstract, multi-layered, neutral-toned sculptures and mixed-media paintings illustrate the artist’s continued study of an array of human processes ranging from balance, order and strength to fragility, coping and vulnerability. Scrutinizing individual emotions, Villere elucidates these inherent juxtapositions that concurrently benefit and

impede the self in a struggle to maintain equilibrium. While these creations may be considered self-portraits, the viewer discerns the universality of the portrayed feelings. The relatability posits Villere’s work as both beautiful and palpable.

Villere says of this latest suite . . .

This exhibition derives from my interest in restriction as a survival strategy. Mental and physical limitations are a necessary part of the human process. Through these intensely emotional works, Preserve reveals the contradictions of self-preservation.

With my work I focus on singular, intimate glimpses of the larger, universal, human condition. Through my sculptures, this exploration visually relies on referencing human processes; both giving surface and form to my emotional expressions. Each work becomes intensely personal through representing a dilemma in my life that yearns for balance. The pieces are born through revealing and concealing, intentionally and intuitively making the emotional physical. They are studies in contradictions; architectural versus geological, destroying versus repairing, protected versus exposed. These dichotomies become emotional and physical editors until I am left with a visual specificity that delivers an overall mood to my viewer.

SIDONIE VILLERE earned a BFA in Ceramics from The Newcomb School of Art at Tulane University and an MFA in Ceramics from The University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth.

Her work has been exhibited across the United States and is in permanent collections of several museums including The New Orleans Museum of Art and The Ogden Museum of Southern Art, as well as Saks Fifth Avenue Department Stores in New York, Boston, Phoenix, San Francisco, Beverly Hills and most recently Chicago.

She has had solo exhibitions in Miami, Nashville and New Orleans and been featured in numerous group exhibitions in Atlanta, Miami, New York and New Orleans. As a curator, she has organized national ceramic exhibitions in New Orleans and Portland, OR. Her large-scale works were exhibited at the Prospect.1 Biennial Welcome Center in 2008. Villere's work was also included in the publication, 500 Ceramic Sculptures: Contemporary Practice, Singular Work, by Glen Brown, 2009. In 2011, her work was selected by collector/curator Beth Rudin DeWoody for the January White Sale, an international group exhibition in Chelsea. That same year her work was shown at Cynthia Volk Gallery New York during Asia Week.

Louisiana State Museum director Mark Tullos said of her work:

“Villere is a native of New Orleans and is one of the most experimental and progressive sculptors and painters working in Louisiana today. Her works in clay remind me of Lynda Benglis, another Louisiana native, who has made significant contributions internationally.”

Sidonie Villere lives and works in New Orleans, LA and is represented by Jonathan Ferrara Gallery.